As we have added solar power to our cabin, i got interested in what would be the optimum angle of the solar panels to the sun. Right now they are mounted facing south at 90 degrees to the horizon. Not very good for summer weather.

After a bit of searching i found a couple of websites with recommendations on the angle of the solar panel for winter/summer. Thinking about it, i thought that we are never at the cabin between mid october and mid february. This implies that we don’t need to optimise the panels for these angles. After a bit more googling i found a matlab script which would tell you the angle of the sun at matlab central called sun_position.m.

I quickly threw together a script which plotted the angle of the sun for the various times of year (sun_day2)

Looking at this figure it becomes obvious that we should we can have a summer angle optimized for May/June and a winter angle optimized for somewhere between Feb/Oct and Mar/Sept. So a summer angle of around 45° and winter angle of around 20°. (Need to find out what time of day to optimize for.)